Sunday, January 8, 2012

Build Update Day 2

The high of kickoff has already worn down and we are starting to get into the gritty details of our design. Starting from the chassis and moving up. Seeing as this is the rookie season for nearly 3/4 of the team; we were hopping to just be able to build the 1114 Kitbot on Steroids(http://goo.gl/pWEkH) and be done with a drive train in week 1. The FIRST Game Design Committee wasn't so nice, they gave us a barrier that we have to get over. We spent a portion of the today doing some CAD work to figure out the geometry of a 6 wheel drive robot climbing the barrier. We were hoping to run some simple tests with last year's chassis but the new classmate (Driver Station laptop) image that is supposed to just work, did everything but. We have been working on it for the past 7+ hours and we still aren't quite finished. We should be able to reimage the cRIO first thing tomorrow and have the old robot running again.

We had a much smaller turnout then I excepted for the day after kickoff, but we were still able to accomplish several of the important tasks.

The beginnings of a prototype shooter assembly are coming together, so that we can test how the ball flies and what we will need to do to actually get it in the goal.

We also did a bit of math to determine ideal wheel speeds for different distance shots. This is something that we will have to develop further while designing the shooter assembly.

Logistics continued to work on reaching out to other teams and also developing the initial ideas for our chairman's award essay.

We did the initial wiring of several of the electrical components that we have standard wire guides for. For instances all of our Jaguars have 4 inch Anderson Powerpole leads on each side of them. This allows us to easily swap them in and out if we ever have a failure.

We also were able to watch the field walk through that was provided by FIRST this year. This is a great addition to the manual because it allows you to actually see people interacting with the field elements. I think this provides a much better understanding of the field than the old way of having people pretending to be robots playing the game.

Tomorrow is the first after school meeting, we'll see how much we can get done on a normal day. Hopefully we can push forward a bit to make up for lost time. (We're only one day in but I still fill a little behind)

- Allen Gregory

"How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time." - Fred Brooks